“We deal daily with the squalid facts of our animality, Hugo had written, putting (illegible) a process of self-censorship so engrained we can no longer see it at work. We do not examine the excrement in the bowl or the phlegm in the handkerchief for moral or ethical (he had first written spiritual in place of ethical, but struck it out) indica-tors. There followed a paragraph that he had excised completely, cross-hatching it in his fervor to erase it. When the text picked up again, it was clearer, but still problematic:
Tears, we may allow, carry a measure of emotional significance. In certain (illegible) sweat may be... (illegible) But as scientific methodologies become increasingly sophisticated their tools charting and (calibrating, was it, or calculating-one of the two the nuances of the phenomenal world with an accuracy that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, we are obliged to reconfigure our assumptions. Chemical signifiers— the sap that oozes from our flesh and organs in response to emotional activity-may be found in all our waste products.
Emotion, in other words, resides in the most despised matter in our local parameters, and it will soon be within the realm of instrument sensitivity that the precise emotional source of these signifiers may be discovered.
In short, we will be able to recognize a quality of mass that carries traces of envy; a sample of sweat containing evidence of our rage; a portion of excrement that may be dubbed loving.”
―
Clive Barker,
Sacrament
